


What kind of fool

by SquaresAreNotCircles



Category: Hawaii Five-0 (2010)
Genre: Angst, Coda, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Episode: s10e07 Ka 'i'o (DNA), First Kiss, M/M, Past Rachel Edwards/Danny "Danno" Williams, Sharing a Bed
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-09
Updated: 2019-11-09
Packaged: 2021-01-26 12:08:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,816
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21373903
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SquaresAreNotCircles/pseuds/SquaresAreNotCircles
Summary: When Steve gets out of the bathroom, there is only a pile of clothes left over on the chair Danny was previously sitting in. He pauses, heart a heavy weight in his chest. “What are you doing?”On the far end of the bed, the one nearest the window, Danny rolls over to face Steve. “Told you. I’m not sleeping on the couch.”Or: Steve is hurting, Danny is immutably present, and philosophy can wait until later.
Relationships: Steve McGarrett/Danny "Danno" Williams
Comments: 28
Kudos: 431





	What kind of fool

**Author's Note:**

> SO. 10.07 happened, and if you haven’t seen it yet, spoilers ahead, but if you have, you’ll know it was an emotional rollercoaster in which Doris died. Additionally, if you’ve seen it, you’ll know it ends with Steve saying some very emotional things when Danny comes to visit him in a drab hotel room in Washington DC, and then Steve gets up and heads to the bathroom and Danny asks if that bed is big enough for two and Steve says no, you’re sleeping on the couch, and the screen fades to black and Danny says he’s not sleeping on the couch, and that’s it. That’s the end of the episode.
> 
> So, obviously, there’s a lot of deeply emotional stuff to be explored, and HEAPS of Doris-related issues to be dug into, and it’s all wonderful and very potent and I might end up doing something with it in the future, but, you know, I’m me. So I wrote mostly comfort instead.
> 
> The title is from the lyric _What kind of fool doesn’t think about it?_ from the song The Rest of My Life by Sloan.

When Steve gets out of the bathroom, there is only a pile of clothes left over on the chair Danny was previously sitting in. He pauses, heart a heavy weight in his chest. “What are you doing?”

On the far end of the bed, the one nearest the window, Danny rolls over to face Steve. “Told you. I’m not sleeping on the couch.” He stays laying down, his head firmly on the pillow, like he thinks that will improve his claim to where he is. The blanket is pulled up to his chin, but he’s probably wearing only boxers and a T-shirt, and worse, he’s in Steve’s bed. 

“That’s stupid,” Steve tells him. He’s too weary to play games, his nerves too frayed, everything much, much too raw.

Danny has no problem signaling with his eyebrows that he doubts Steve’s intelligence, even while lying horizontally. “_You’re_ stupid if you were serious about condemning one of us to backpain and a crick in his neck for no reason. Why are you being so difficult?”

The answer to that is simple. Steve may not know how he feels, but he imagines it’s similar to being flayed open and stitched back together wrong, and he knows he’s hit his limits a while ago. He doesn’t look forward to torturing himself by getting too close to things he wants but can’t have – in his current condition, he might not survive. 

Of course he can’t say that, so he scrubs a flat hand over his beard and falls back on something easy but bad. Something that still reveals way too much if Danny thinks about it for two seconds. “What’s Rachel going to think of this?”

“What’s your pretty vet going to think of it?” Danny asks, like those are similar questions in any way.

Steve huffs. “Nothing. She’s probably not thinking about me at all after two months.”

“Right,” Danny says, unsurprised and judgement free for the first time in ages when it comes to Steve’s broken dating life. “Neither is Rachel.”

Steve stays very quiet, turning that over in his mind. It doesn’t make sense.

Danny watches him be confused and frustrated, until at some arbitrary point, he seems to decide to take pity. “We broke up,” he says.

Steve swallows hard. He turns away, not really sure where he’s going, but sure that he can’t let Danny see his eyes for this. “I’m sorry.” He hopes it doesn’t sound too fake. His bag is in the corner, close to where Danny carelessly threw his own duffel to the floor, so he kneels by it and pretends to be rooting around for something.

“Yeah, well.” Danny’s tone is light. He can’t really be feeling that blasé about the death of a laboriously resuscitated relationship that seemed very important to him for the last year or so, but if Danny is acting, at least it means Steve won’t have to do any consoling tonight. “I learned some things too, over the past weeks. For example, I really don’t know how to keep a romantic relationship going when I’m busy not sleeping because I spend all my time worrying about you.”

Steve straightens without getting anything from the bag, walks over to the light switch and flips it off. All the light bulbs in the room wink out, leaving only the drab grey half-light that filters in from outside. He heads over to the window to pull the curtains shut against the still slightly pink hues of the sky, and only then can he pause again to think. “What does that mean?”

“What do you think it means? Come on, can we stop talking already?”

His hands still clutch the nondescript beige curtains. He lets go, carefully, not thinking about his mom’s hand under his own, not thinking about how he let her life slip through his fingers, not thinking about anything at all.

He turns, and the room is dark now, but not so dark that he can’t make out Danny’s form. Danny is sitting up in bed, elbows on his knees, watching him. Danny is always watching him. Always worrying about him. Always coming for him, not matter where in the world he ends up.

“Steve?” Danny asks.

Steve swallows again. “Yeah,” he says. He sounds hoarse. “Yeah, okay, whatever.” He kicks off his shoes, wrestles out of his pants and sweater, and dumps them on the same chair as Danny’s jacket and outer clothes. He slides his arm sling back on over his remaining T-shirt. When he turns to the bed, Danny is still watching him.

Danny scoots over, to the previously free side, and pats the space on the mattress where he lay a moment ago. 

Life on life’s terms: we don’t get to choose how it’s going to look. Only what we do with the information when we get it, and maybe not even then, not always, because it doesn’t feel like a conscious choice when Steve gives in. It feels like inevitability. Like clinging to a ledge for ages and gravity finally asserting dominance.

Still. It’s nice to lie down, even if he has to do it gingerly and he can really only lie on his back with his left arm confined like this. The spot is warmed up from Danny’s body heat, and the presence of another person is even more undeniable when Danny moves to lean over him and tuck the blanket in, like Steve is five. Ordinarily that would freak him out, but there’s nothing ordinary about this thing between him and Danny, and he doesn’t think there ever was. It’s about nine years too late for that.

Once Danny is finally satisfied Steve is as burrito-like as can be, he lies down too, and they blink at each other from their respective pillows. For all that they’ve shared over the years – beer, living space, fights, hurt, pain, dreams, a liver and a half-realized restaurant – they’ve never slept in the same bed. Steve’s heart hammers in his ribcage with how right-wrong-right it feels. “I could kick you in my sleep.”

“I’ll kick you back,” Danny promises, which shouldn’t be reassuring, but is. “I think you were wrong, you know.”

Steve breathes in and out. The right-wrong-right of pillow talk with Danny is rapidly morphing into right-right-right, but he can’t get his smitten brain to be alarmed by it. “About what?”

“Life’s terms.” Danny lifts his head, rearranges his own pillow, and lies back down. His face is a few inches closer. “About how we don’t get to control anything that happens, only react to it. Maybe that’s true for the big things – death, war, what other people do – but the small things, the stuff that often matters most? That’s all on us.”

It’s not a surprise that Danny doesn’t agree with him. They’re at odds as much of the time as they’re on the same line. “How do you figure?” Steve asks, just to keep Danny talking. 

“I came here because I care about you,” Danny says, in that way he has that makes those things sound simple and self-evident. Like that’s just what people do, even though Steve knows it’s not. He’s bled for it, fought for it, nearly been shot by his own mother for it. “That’s not life handing us a choice that’s already been made for us. You could have just not opened the door when I knocked.”

Here: this is the point where Steve can’t go along anymore. “No, I couldn’t.”

“Why?”

Steve turns his head to align with the rest of his body, which means he’s looking at the empty off-white ceiling, grey in the dark. He doesn’t make it a full second before he’s turning his head back to Danny. “For one, you would’ve kicked down the door.”

“I don’t think so. I come in peace, Steve.” The words are a joke. The way Danny says them is not. He waits until Steve is done studying his face and they have direct eye contact before he adds, “On your terms.”

It makes sense that a punch hurts, or harsh words, or the memory of past betrayal. It’s never made any sense to Steve that a person can feel so much affection for another human being that it feels like a stab to the chest, too. “Thank you,” he rasps at the ceiling. This time, he manages to avoid looking at Danny for more than a second, but only because it’s safer not to look at him while he searches for Danny’s hand under their shared blanket.

Danny’s hand finds his first. It squeezes and doesn’t let go after. Steve squeezes back and holds on too tightly and tries to fight the prickle behind his eyes by wrenching them shut, but it’s only barely enough. 

The image of his mother’s lifeless body on the floor tries to creep behind his eyelids. The blood on her teeth, her lips, her chin. Ugly red against the perfect white of her shirt, just above their pile of hands, her small ones which he can’t even feel right because he’s still wearing his gloves, and it’s just like in his dream, with the distance he can’t breach because there’s a barrier between them that he’s not equipped to handle. He doesn’t know how to conquer it and so it stays, even while she dies, even during her last moments on the dirty floor in the stuffy, hot hangar, the smell of gun powder persisting in the air around them. 

A cool hand smooths back the hair on his forehead, which slams him back into the present. It lingers and makes the movement again and Steve’s breath hitches. Holding it for a long moment keeps anything worse from escaping. 

When the words come, they’re a whisper against the dark and quiet. “I’m going to have to tell Mary that I couldn’t save her.”

“Yeah,” Danny whispers back. He doesn’t try to pretend it will be okay. He doesn’t attempt to offer up anything that might make it better, which would be a doomed endeavor. He’s just there.

“Danny,” Steve says, and he turns his head again, searching, and finds Danny still watching him. He pushes up on the elbow of his good arm without letting go of Danny’s hand, and he thinks about terms and choices and opening the door to Danny’s knock and if they get any say in anything they do, and decides that for tonight, those big, philosophical questions can wait. Tonight, he kisses Danny.

Danny agrees to his terms softly, chastely, with warmth.

Later Steve still has a nightmare, but it’s the first time in eight weeks that he sleeps six consecutive hours before he does. When he startles awake, the room is even darker and Danny is still right next to him, and Danny’s slow breathing lulls him back to sleep easily with its steady right-right-rightness.

**Author's Note:**

> Fun fact: There Is Only One Bed, Whatever Will We Do Now is actually one of my favorite fic tropes, but I’d never written it as such for these two, and I was very much in the process of doing so for an unrelated fic when this episode came along and oh my god, now there’ll be ALL the bed sharing fic in this fandom. Christmas came early this year, haha!
> 
> Thank you for reading!! I hope you have a wonderful day and if you can, consider leaving a comment, because that’s the kind of thing that often makes my day pretty wonderful. ❤ 
> 
> I’m on Tumblr as [itwoodbeprefect](https://itwoodbeprefect.tumblr.com), or with my exclusively H50 (and mostly McDanno) sideblog as [five-wow](https://five-wow.tumblr.com).


End file.
